Tarzana Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Tarzana is a southern San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around Ventura Boulevard, named for Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzana ranch. Predominantly single-family ranch homes south of Ventura on the Santa Monica Mountains foothills.
Seven categories moved in Tarzana this April — four of those as sustained structural shifts, pointing to a months-long realignment rather than a single noisy month. The dominant pull is downward across most property and violent crime, but one category breaks the pattern sharply: other larceny is the single spike this briefing, set against two drops and four sustained-shift signals.
Other larceny stands out hardest: 397 incidents in the trailing 12 months against a baseline mean of 205.15, up 58.2% from the 251 recorded in the prior-year period. Theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft both moved in the opposite direction — theft from vehicle is down 28.9% (135 vs. 190) and motor vehicle theft down 22.5% (86 vs. 111) over the same window. Burglary, vandalism, aggravated assault, and sexual assault are all running well below prior-year levels, suggesting the sustained-shift signals are largely structural declines holding across multiple categories.
Notable signals 3
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 397 incidents — about 94% above the 205 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 135 incidents — about 44% below the 243 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 86 incidents — about 40% below the 144 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 397, up 58% from 251 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 145, down 32% from 212 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 215, down 27% from 293 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 135, down 29% from 190 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through April 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Arson
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Burglary
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
Vandalism
How Tarzana compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable other larceny levels.”
Westlake
400 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Tarzana's 397.
Open page →Encino
411 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 above Tarzana's 397.
Open page →Mid-Wilshire
376 incidents over the past 12 months — 21 below Tarzana's 397.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Tarzana has spiked other larceny historically (15 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 21 | 19% |
| Vandalism | 17 | 94.1% |
| Other larceny | 15 | 100% |
| Burglary | 14 | 100% |
| Sexual assault | 5 | 40% |
| Motor vehicle theft | 3 | — too few |
| Theft from vehicle | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Tarzana's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Los Angeles); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Tarzana, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.
How we built this page
Counts from March 2024 onwardrun roughly 10 to 20 percent below LAPD's command-staff totals citywide. LAPD's legacy crime feed froze after a late-2024 cyber incident, and the replacement NIBRS feed has been shipping fewer rows than LAPD's own statistics show. The shortfall is most visible in homicide and in dense south-LA neighborhoods, because the new feed lacks coordinates and resolves location through reporting districts. Trend direction is still meaningful; absolute levels are not directly comparable to LAPD's headline figures.
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from LAPD's open feed on the LA City Open Data portal — the NIBRS-coded feed from 2024-03 onward with UCR backfill to 2020. Mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories and aggregated to neighborhood × category × month.Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.